METODOLOGIA GENERAL

The systems approach has been employed in strategies to mitigate safety incidents in a range of contexts – from industrial to aviation to road safety. The approach considers these incidents as failures of the social-technical system, resulting from unexpected, uncontrolled relationships between a system’s constituent parts (Levenson, 2004). According to Reason (2000), systems theory “concentrates on the conditions under which individuals work and tries to build defences to avert errors or mitigate their effects.” The ethos of this approach is that understanding accidents and defining the appropriate measures require the study of the system as a whole, rather than considering its parts in isolation (Rasmussen, 1997).

In applying a Safe System approach to road safety, the elements of the road system should be considered in interaction and in combination with each other. The Safe System approach starts with the ethical imperative that no human being should be killed or seriously injured in a road crash and aims to strengthen all dimensions of road safety, including the organisational levels, and manage them holistically and not as separate parts in “silos” (OECD/ITF, 2016).

Within road safety it is often stated that more than 90% of all road traffic accidents can be attributed to driver error. This simplistic outlook ignores the dynamic interactions among the road environment, the vehicle, and the road-user which can mislead to the inexact conclusion that improving driver behaviour is the only effective road safety strategy. In fact the road transport system consists of a plethora of components in the form of road users, vehicles and infrastructure elements that see millions of interactions each day. A Safe System approach in road safety recognises the complex nature of the transport system acknowledging that multiple factors interact to culminate in a crash (Zein and Navin, 2003).

SafetyCube through the DSS, provides evidence-based information that considers the interrelationship of both risks and the appropriate measures across the road safety system. Including elements of infrastructure, road user behaviour and vehicles. In addition it recognises a key element of a Safe System is the drive to irradiate serious injury as well as fatalities. To address this the DSS includes specific information about injury prevention and, indicates the added value of measures for reducing serious injury. The DSS, applies a systems perspective to the latest road safety research in an easy to understand format suitable for use by policy makers.

The Safe System approach rejects the more traditionally ‘human error’ blame focussed perspective to road safety, and instead takes into account all ‘components’ in a system (i.e. road users, vehicles, roads) which contribute to a risk of an accident occurring. Therefore, in DSS, risk factors have been identified and evaluated from across the system. Additionally a

large range of measures are considered and all applicable measures have been linked to relevant risk factors. In practice this means that while a risk factor may originate in one area of the system (e.g. road user behaviour) the range of measures which are applicable to address this may come from all areas of the system (e.g. road user behaviour, infrastructure or vehicle focused). In this way, instead of treating measures in isolation (one measure to one risk), the potential for added value of multiple measures is apparent and has been taken into account through the innovative SafetyCube approach to linking risks and measures.

DSS, grounded in Safe System approach, constitutes a very useful tool for policy makers and other stakeholders, as it provides the full picture regarding the risk factors and the road safety measures and can facilitate an evidence-based policy. However, the DSS is itself a tool and is limited by the information found within it.

In developing the DSS two major areas where future benefits of the Safe System approach may be realised are apparent: the consideration of serious injuries and combining measures. A true Safe System approach seeks that no human is killed or seriously injured, however, scientific studies more commonly consider the impact of risks and measures on fatalities than serious injury. To address this lack of knowledge the DSS considers serious injury as a specific topic. However, from a systems perspective this is not ideal. It is hoped that future research will consider serious injuries alongside fatalities, once this research knowledge is developed the DSS could be fully enhanced to cover all areas of the system. Another limitation of the current DSS content is that the majority of studies included consider road safety measures in isolation. A challenge to the research community is to depart from traditional research silos and evaluate measures in combination. The novel SafetyCube approach to linking risks and measures demonstrates the potential areas where measures can be combined. It is hoped that future research will use these links and evaluate a combined measures approach.

7 Dissemination, user feedback

and next steps

Throughout the SafetyCube project interaction and feedback from stakeholders has

been in invaluable in shaping the DSS. The dissemination of SafetyCube findings is

an essential step in the stakeholder communication process. Great effort has been

taken to disseminate findings to as wide an audience as possible. As a result of the

interactions with stakeholders, useful feedback for the improvement and

adjustment to the user needs was obtained during the DSS development within the

project, and a number of future upgrades and areas for potential improvements to

the DSS have been identified for beyond the end of the SafetyCube project.